


To Keep On Living

by CloudDreamer



Series: Demon Eyes [19]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: F/F, Fever, Grief/Mourning, Loneliness, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:42:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23670994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: Carmilla knows this: there is no home to go back to. Knowing this can't keep her from wanting one.Title from “Famous Last Words” by My Chemical Romance.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla/Loreli
Series: Demon Eyes [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698556
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	To Keep On Living

There’s no such thing as home anymore.

Carmilla walks through the hallways of the Silvana, perfectly silently. The art of moving without disturbing the environment was difficult to learn, but she has since become the universe’s foremost expert. She is the universe’s foremost expert in so many things. 

Loneliness chief among them. 

For a moment there, practically the blink of her still working eye, she’d almost managed to fool herself into thinking she’d made something to last. Her moments of pride wouldn’t be fleeting, couldn’t be stolen away by time, she’d convinced herself, but now her Mechanisms were gone. This time, there’s nobody to blame but herself. The Toy Soldier still shows up sometimes, inexplicably and irreparably, and it’s only in times like these, where it’s been months or maybe years since she’s seen another sentient life form for any reason other than to feed, that she remembers how unreal it really is. When she rests her head in its lap, she can pretend it means something, anything, that it thinks she’s a friend and not a monster.

The stars are so very far apart from each other, a distance that feels incomprehensible. Worlds she’s traveled every inch, catalogued in her songs, are nothing more than pinpricks in the distance now. When she returns to that sector in this galaxy, all the people she met will be long dead. Their descendants will have forgotten them, if those species aren’t extinct. If those planets haven’t returned to the stardust they were born in.  
There is nobody but her for billions of miles. Nobody to hurt, nobody to help. The only thing to fight out here is herself, and she’s been down that road so many times. Hallucinations flicker at the edge of her vision. Blinking clears the long dead faces away for now, and she hums louder than the voices. Her hands are shaking, and she stills them with a thought. 

The quiver of the Silvana’s engines shakes through the walls. Most everyone else would find the temperature unbearably cold, if it didn’t kill them outright, but for her, it’s perfectly neutral. She can’t die from the temperature, she knows. She’s floated through space and burned in that sun for long enough. 

The heat spikes beneath her skin at the thought of those agonizingly long years. It’s not real, she knows, she’s tested her body’s limits, and she knows no matter how much she boils, no matter how hot her empty veins run, anyone who who touches her will feel the chill of a corpse. She closes her lips, pale blue beneath her lipstick, and pulls her cape tight across her chest in defiance of the psychosomatic pain. There are many sorts of ways to die out there. She’s invented plenty herself, experienced, and dolled out most of them in turn. But burning, a classic, has remained and Carmilla suspects will remain up among the most painful. Not quite on par with turning into a vampire— nothing will _ever_ match that slow and agonizing process— but it hurts like hell, and she always feels like the fire in her chest is on the edge of consuming her. Never enough to end her. Nothing will ever be enough for that. 

She forces herself to exhale, breaking off the song that’d she’d fallen too deeply into. She counts the colors she can see, names the stars in the distance, and by the time she’s done, she’s stable again. She can lapse into her peaceful melancholy as she places her hand on the reinforced windows to the endless skies. 

She keeps running. The Silvana is hers, but she’s not home. Not when every piece of her is replaceable, so quick to change. Maybe this space is her home; the world between the stars. In absence, she finds consistency. Grief is her universal constant. She will feel better again, one of these endless nights, but that’s not now. In the future, this will be nothing but a memory. Her mistakes will overpower her or they will feel trivial, and either way, she will recreate them. She will find love, and she will lose it. She doesn’t know if this resignation is reasonable or if it’s depression, a distinction that doesn’t matter when it won’t change the outcome. She’s fought against this mindset before, and she’s fallen back into it every time. 

Hope is painful. Hope is work. And yet, still, she can’t seem to destroy it. She can’t bare the pain of losing it but every time she thinks she’s managed to excise it for good, it grows up inside her chest like ivy. It chokes her, even though she doesn’t need to breathe. 

Home is two girls hiding in abandoned buildings, because they’ve been abandoned too. It’s how they’d fall asleep in each other’s laps and dream of Sirens blaring. It’s their tentative kisses in the ashes of someone else’s world, hands so fragile even as they survived, unbroken, through the worst of times. Home is not safe, but it is theirs and that's enough. 

Carmilla will never have home again.


End file.
